The present invention relates to surgical cassettes and more particularly to an identification system for surgical cassettes.
The use of cassettes with surgical instruments to help manage irrigation and aspiration flows into a surgical site are well-known. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,493,695, 4,627,833 (Cook), U.S. Pat. No. 4,395,258 (Wang, et al.), U.S. Pat. No. 4,713,051 (Steppe, et al.), U.S. Pat. No. 4,798,850 (DeMeo, et al), U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,758,238, 4,790,816 (Sundblom, et al.), and U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,267,956, 5,364,342 (Beuchat) all disclose tubeless or tube-type surgical cassettes and are incorporated herein in their entirety by reference.
The fluidic performance of the surgical instrument is substantially affected by the fluidic performance of the cassette. As a result, prior art surgical instruments and cassettes are designed to work as an integral system, with the fluidic performance of the cassette designed to optimize the fluidic performance of the entire surgical system. This integral design concept has required that prior art surgical instruments be used with only one specific cassette, and that any given cassette interacts with only one type of surgical instrument.
With the advances made in the last few years in digital circuitry, it is desirable to design and build surgical instruments that can manually or automatically change the surgical operating parameters to suit special situations or a surgeon's specific operating preferences. Parameters such as aspiration fluid flow rate, pump speed, vacuum level, irrigation fluid pressure and irrigation fluid flow rate can be preprogrammed for a specific surgeon or surgical procedure. This increased flexibility of modern surgical instruments is somewhat limited by the inflexibility of the surgical cassette. In order to optimize the surgical system, the performance of the cassette should be optimized for the specific surgical procedure or the specific set of parameters being used by the surgeon. While a cassette with adjustable fluidics performance is one alternative, the most cost effective method of optimizing cassette performance, particularly if the cassette is intended to be discarded after a single use, is to design a different cassette for each surgical procedure or set of operating parameters, however, the use of different cassettes requires that the instrument "recognize" the type of cassette being used.
Accordingly, a need exists for a cassette identification system.